MsCMPImport v2.7 plugin By P1p3r -alt dl added
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Oy!!
Bloody well elaborate a bit then, I’m not so daft, almost all triangles I tried do NOT explain to the exporter how to place themselves!
What shape do YOU use?
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The place I use MS for HP’s most is for SUR export. Creating a triangle from the top view, top point first methinks. Still some times it comes out upside down
easy 'nuff fix, but still takes time. Though it’s easy to create the HP’s in MS for CMP’s and then just use UTF 4 to move them to the correct locations, but as you stated; they aren’t always oriented perfectly.If Beeejay knows a secret I be a happeh camper to hear it as well
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Im sure he has done a tutorial OR in a post somewhere has explained how this is done lol
if not search for Dritz’s tutorial on making ships from scratch
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I haven’t seen one by Bejaymac, although it could have been a line or twa in another tut, and if he has I think his Scawts-English-Scawts translator needs improvin’ a wee dram or twa’. (Mind ye, if ye lewk onder his Sporran ye’ll ken the why!! - My guess is it’s all slung loose under there!!) Heheheh.
All the tut’s I’ve seen just say “make a triangle” - one ( I think it might have been Argh’s?) says “with approximately equal sides”. That means equilateral. Tried it. No, it was screwed up.
In my view, the exporter should have been designed to understand an ISOSCELES triangle (one with only 2 sides the same length, so it has a greater height than width) (although how does it guess whether it’s flipped by more than 90 degrees in any plane - but it does, sometimes - it could be by the normals, which would be sensible!), and by the designer placing it after the group it belongs to. It doesn’t, whether they are in between groups or not they get placed willy-nilly. Well, it doesn’t see that I made my triangles with two longer sides than the base.
Any way, why is anyone arguing with the need for a new exporter that would make good hardpoints at the same time, for goodness’ sakes? Surely that’s a good thing?
Have you all gone absolutely mad?
Gnnaaaaaaahhhhh!!
ANYWAY EVEN IF YOU LOT DON’T WANT ONE, I MOST CERTAINLY DO! SO THERE!! <tosses his=“” toys=“” out=“” of=“” pram=“”>:D</tosses>
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The place I use MS for HP’s most is for SUR export.
uhhh… I’m lost! Hardpoints in your SUR export?? How come?
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Open up a vanilla SUR file. In it you’ll see a standard mesh type for each HardPoint: Turret, Gun, CM, Torp / CD, and Shield -all built into the SUR itself. Exporting the SUR from MS with HP’s gets that result.
As for the mechanics of it, someone with more knowledge on SURs could likely answer that, but I suspect that their presence allows for shots hitting those mounted items to proxy the damage down to the part they’re mounted to (since these items all have SURs and health of their own).
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Ah yes, I forgot.
But then I don’t use weapon surs.
So my weapons don’t get destroyed, huh?
Not a bad thing when I’m pitching players against some seriously bad enemies in my mods! rofl
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No real secret to doing it, patience and a lot of trial & error, unlike the rest of you I don’t have a problem with exporting something, finding out something didn’t work, erase it, tweek the model, rinsing & repeating a dozen times isn’t unusual for me.
It doesn’t realy matter what shape the polygon is, as the exporter uses the centre point of the groups bounding box as it’s reference point for the hardpoint. What throws the orientation is the number of different polygon angles the bounding box comes into contact with, stick a hardpoint on a curve and you get wierd results, stick it on a flat plane or the centre of a big poly and you get a much better result, especially if the bounding box is tiny
Left is what I use for my hardpoints, a simple arrowhead that always points to the front of the ship, any rotation I do is always on the Z axis. The right is to show you the size, that’s the pilot mesh and that little red dot on his nose is the hardpoint.Even like this I don’t always get the hardpoints to behave, sometimes I have no choice but to edit them in hardcmp.
@ Mini_Me, I did all of my early SURs with hardpoints, it gives you a very complex SUR very similar to DA’s. There was only 2 real problems with that method, destructibles don’t work right. The “blanket” components send almost all of the damage to the Root rather than share it with the components & Root, set the collisiongroup to 2 hitpoints and you’ll lose most of your health before the collisiongroup is destroyed, even if all of the damage is inflicted to the component. The second problem is to do with just after a collisiongroup is destroyed, when any collisiongroups on the right side of the model are destroyed that part of the CMP should vanish and take that part of the SUR with it, unfortunatly that’s not what happens, instead the SUR part refuses to go and causes a big fat CTD. Please bear in mind that this is with the 1.1 exporter, I’m one of those unfortunates that can’t get milkshape to load the 1.2 plugin, not sure if it’s because I’m on a craptop, or if it’s because I have an intel chipset, but whatever it is milkshape just doesn’t look at the plugin.
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Great Stuff.
;D
TYMakes the model cloner a bit useless.
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Bit late on the reply lol but TY Bejay for that little tip. Makes perfect sense. For some reason I hadn’t figured it creates a bounding box for the HP face since it gets replace in the export.
Have you tried using actual meshes for the HP’s (instead of the single tri)? Like custom boxes / shapes for turrets / shields / CM’s ? I noticed on turrets, no matter which way you orient the HP face, the mesh always faces towards the front of the ship -which looks pretty lame on a rear mounted turret meant for defense.
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What’s happened to P1p3r?
Hasn’t been heard from for long time, he was in the middle of producing a valuable cmp exporter.
Anyone in touch, is he OK at least?
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hi,
i have freelancer for a long time, and always wanted to get into modding, but never did so far…
now i want to give it a go but ofc, most of the dl links are dead :s is there anywhere where i can download the cmp importer…? could anyone pls give me a link or mail it to me…?
email is: anubitusAThotmailDOTcom
thanks in advance…
